The instructions are clear before we enter Viola’s Room, Punchdrunk Theatre’s latest immersive performance piece: always follow the light. If—no, when—you find yourself in total darkness, remain where you are, listening to Helena Bonham Carter’s narration of this ghost story in your binaural (spookily realistic!) headset. When you see a new light appear, follow it through the labyrinth, moving as slowly or as quickly as the light does.
This is a very different experience from Punchdrunk’s celebrated Sleep No More. There are no actors, just Bonham-Carter’s deceptively soothing voice. We don’t engage with an installation at our own pace. We enter as a group of six and explore this environment at a pace dictated by the many lights, some fuzzy lamps on the ceilings, others will-o’-the wisps that dash ahead, still others spotlights on artifacts we are meant to examine.
But before we enter the installation, we are brought to an anteroom with benches. Here we remove our shoes and socks, spray our feet with disinfectant, and put away our footwear—along with phones, watches, anything that might emit light—each into our own little boxes, which are whisked away under a curtain.
I quite enjoyed this little threshold activity, along with its parallel at the end, where our boxes magically reappear from behind the curtain. In addition to the disinfectant, the benches this time hold small buckets of water and paper towels for us to wash the black sand from our feet. My feet were dirty, but it’s also quite a lovely ritual cleansing after a liminal experience.
So what happens in between these bookended rituals?
We begin in a girl’s bedroom, where six mattresses are laid out on the floor for us. (Oof! Seventy-year-old bodies are no longer designed to get down on the floor as easily as we used to.) The lights dim as the ghost story begins. Just as I begin to feel a bit pleasantly sleepy, the lights come up and our first will-o’-the wisp directs us to a tunnel at one end of the room, through which we crawl to reach the next room. Nice little birthing symbolism, that, but again, the seventy-year-old body thing…
I don’t quite remember the details of how the rest of the experience played out, and I confess to having had a hard time following the story (a princess, an arranged marriage, frenzied dancing in the woods, a cloven hoof…). Perhaps it was a bit of cognitive overload, as I took in the music, the visuals, the unexpected shifts in the surface I was walking on, which included fabric, floor, sand, irregular wooden planks in the sand.
And that instruction to follow the light at all times? Well, yes, but make sure it’s the right one! At one point I caught sight of a light and began to follow it before it vanished. Suddenly, I was alone. Or I thought I was. It’s hard to know when you’re in complete darkness wearing headphones. I waited, remembering we’d been told the experience was being monitored. Sure enough, after a bit (five minutes? who knows?), a staff member ran into me (literally), then switched on her flashlight and silently led me back to my group.
I don’t know that I minded much getting lost in the dark, but it feels perhaps emblematic of the general disorientation I felt. Punchdrunk has created a striking sensory world, but I never quite understood it.
And perhaps that’s my particular challenge, my analytical brain intruding into that dreamlike experience, trying to make sense of it all. And I suspect, too, that I wasn’t quite the target audience, not just because I found myself focusing on what my body was being asked to navigate in the dark, but because the music—Tori Amos, Smashing Pumpkins, Massive Attack—didn’t trigger the emotional resonance I might have found had it been music from my past, the Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel, for example.
That general problem—finding a balance between atmosphere and narrative clarity—is endemic to immersive theater, and Punchdrunk seems to me to find the balance as well as anyone. But even in such an impressively created work, I found myself more fascinated than moved, a bit disoriented by an experience that I couldn’t quite grasp.
Explore it for yourself—and let me know what you think! It’s playing at the Shed in New York until October 19.
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